How can I trigger a notification when a job/process ends?

Generally, if you know this before running the command, you can just start it with:

command; command-after &

This will execute the command-after after the previous command has exited (regardless of its exit code). The & will start it in background.

If you care about a successful or failure exit, respectively use:

command && command-after-only-if-success &
command || command-after-only-if-fail &

If the command has already started you may use job control to suspend it, then return it to the foreground with fg chained with your notification:

command
# enter Ctrl-z
fg ; command-after

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Now … what you want to do after this depends on your environment.

• On any system, you can "ring" the terminal bell. Depends on your exact system what really works (BSD vs. GNU Linux, etc.), but tput bel should do. I couldn't reliably test it right now, though. Search for "ring bell" to find out more.

• On Mac OS X, you could use AppleScript to pop up a Finder dialog:

  osascript -e 'tell Application "Finder" to display dialog "Job finished" '
  

  You could have it say something to you:

  say "Job finished"
  

  Or you could use Mountain Lion's notification system:

  sudo gem install terminal-notifier # <= only need to do this once
  terminal-notifier -message "Job finished!" -title "Info"
  

• In GNOME, zenity can show a GTK dialog box, called from the command line. See also this Stack Overflow question: showing a message box from a bash script in linux. It can be installed through your favorite package manager.

  zenity --info --text="Job finished"
  

• Some distributions might have xmessage. Specifically for GTK environments, there is gxmessage.

• On desktop enviroments that implement the Desktop Notifications Specification, such as Ubuntu and GNOME, there's a notification system that you can trigger with notify-send (part of libnotify).

  notify-send "Job finished!"
  

• KDE uses kdialog, for example:

  kdialog --passivepopup 'Job finished'
  

On unix-like systems you can ring the audible-bell:

echo -e "\a"

I created a simple tool, for MacOS X, that does exactly this. https://github.com/vikfroberg/brb

Installation

$ npm install -g brb

Instructions

$ sleep 3; brb